USCIS to End Work Permits for Spouses of H-1B Visa Holders [pdf]
judiciary.senate.gov
judiciary.senate.gov
In most cases, if your application for permanent residency is approved, then you just immediately become a permanent resident and you and your spouse have the right to work regardless. The exception is if you come from China or India, where the number of immigrants have hit the statutory caps, and there is a waiting time (currently between 6 and 10 years, depending on the type of green card application [2]). So I think the upshot is that this will make things more difficult for Chinese and Indian green card applicants.
[1] https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/temporary-worker...
[2] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v...
Except that process takes another year or so.
> So I think the upshot is that this will make things more difficult for Chinese and Indian green card applicants.
Oh how wonderful, keep the lower classes down.
How delightfully racist.
edit: I'm sorry. TIL what upshot actually means.
The usage of upshot simply means the final outcome - neither a good thing or a bad.
That's less than true, because:
> The exception is if you come from China or India, where the number of immigrants have hit the statutory caps, and there is a waiting time (currently between 6 and 10 years, depending on the type of green card application [2]).
From your own source, China, India, the Phillipines, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras all have delays in certain categories (and Vietnam is expected to starting next month), actually, and the waiting times are between <1 and 24 years. (And that's actually a backward looking waiting time, so when you say a particular category is a 10 year waiting time, that actually means it was a 10 year waiting time for people applying 10 years ago, but the countries where applicants outnumber slots are fairly consistent, so those waiting times tend to get longer over time.)
Also, because the per country cap is generally the same for all countries in each category, the onss with backlogs are also the ones with the highest number of applicants, so what is true of most countries (an applicant from that country will not face a delay) is less valid a generalization when it comes to most applicants.
1. Spouses of certain H1-B holders were allowed to work, without restrictions
2. The restriction part is worth talking about. H1-B ties you to an employer, the H4-EAD doesn't. Along with that comes portability, and freedom - things that should not affect wage depreciation.
So - the proposal is to take away work privileges from honest, legal, tax paying individuals that (in theory) do not contribute to wage depreciation. At a time when social services are stretched, and with record low-unemployment, this seems like a bad idea for America, and lost tax wages for the government
Specifically, those with approved petitions for permanent residency but who have not yet become permanent residents (because they are from a country where the per-country per-year visa limits in their immigration category have created a backlog.)
> So - the proposal is to take away work privileges from honest, legal, tax paying individuals that (in theory) do not contribute to wage depreciation.
Why would you think that they are exceptions to the rule that added supply reduces market clearing cost?
> At a time when social services are stretched, and with record low-unemployment, this seems like a bad idea for America, and lost tax wages for the government
The idea is to make the conversion to permanent residence (and H-1B status itself) less attractive and get immigrants to voluntarily self-deport. It's a great idea if you are a xenophobic nativist, and it might have some small short-term benefits in terms of wages in some fields, until the jobs move overseas to follow the workers chased out.
Wage deprecation (allegations) from H1-B isn't from an increased supply. It's from the lack of portability once employed. Optimally, every 3-5 years, a jump would result in higher wage growth than working for the same employer. The H4-EAD allows for free movement, alleviating this one sub category of wage deprecation.
So, you think H-1B as well as H-4 EAD are exceptions to the basic dynamics of supply and demand?
Even if you assume the immigrants involved have the same distribution of salary demands as the general American workforce, adding them to the domestic labor supply decreases market clearing costs for labor of the type they are available to do, all else being equal. (Of course, if they have lower salary demands, this is even more pronounced without a prevailing wage rule, which H-1B has but H-4 EAD does not.)
The H1-B's aim is to fill a shortage of skilled labor. Annual caps exist explicitly to control supply and prevent wage depreciation.
The thing that wasn't accounted for was captivity of H1-B holders from certain countries who'd applied for their greencard. Given the long wait times, they are effectively enslaved to their employer. With reduced portability comes reduced wage increase
About 1): Non-immigrant means a person that doesn't have an intention to stay. In practice, many people with H-1Bs end up applying for a green card. Meaning that most do have an intention to stay.
Note that grabbing a productive, educated, working-age professional from a country can be seen as a good thing. Similar to how large cities grab professionals from smaller cities.
About 2): The wage requirements were not updated for many years, not even for inflation and this resulted in a lot of people being hired for salaries that were lower than market value. This is bad for local workers.
About 3): Some companies like Infosys and Tata tricked the quota system by sending multiple applications per candidate until they got in. Personally I think that Infosys and Tata should have been penalized more aggressively.
Mostly because of 2 and 3 I think the system needed reform. About spouses I am mostly neutral.
Finally, there is more going on. There are a bunch of people interviewing at large companies violating interview NDAs and passing interview questions around in websites. The country of origin of most of those sites? India. While there is merit in learning CS, and there's merit in becoming a stronger software engineer, violating NDAs makes technical interviews harder for good faith applicants and is a good way to build a bad global reputation.
H1B is dual intent (unlike, lets say F1). You are allowed to file for immigration if you want to.
> About 2): The wage requirements were not updated for many years, not even for inflation and this resulted in a lot of people being hired for salaries that were lower than market value. This is bad for local workers.
You are blindly comparing salaries of Bay Area and other tech hubs with salaries in midwest. In 98.7% of the cases, the companies with low salaries on H1B have employees in remote regions of USA with above average salary, or they work in different fields which have lower median salaries.
Now, regarding the wages, that's a bit more controversial. IEEE-USA published this: http://theinstitute.ieee.org/ieee-roundup/blogs/blog/ieeeusa...
They demand employees to give them power of attorney, they force employees to let them calculate their tax returns, and demand that employees give them their federal and state tax refund money. Maybe this is no longer the case, but doesn't change the fact they're shady AF.
They could be possibly paying people less than what they're required to as well.
Source: "Who Cheats and How?: Scams, Fraud and the Dark Side of the Corporate World" By Robin Banerjee
Those guys should not be allowed to do business here.
It's explicitly a dual intent visa.
Contrast it to the TN status available to Canadians/Mexicans, which is not dual intent. Having the intent to immigrate when taking a TN position is reason to reject the application.
> Mostly because of 2 and 3 I think the system needed reform
Oh absolutely.
The are also other non-immigrant visa programs: professors, religious workers, agricultural workers, in addition to the specific temporary worker visas related to free trade agreements.
Why bring round about changes that hurt the MIT grad as much as a random code shop employee bought in by Infosys ? Why not directly target these abusers ? Why not have an element on merit when evaluating PR requests ? Australia does it, and it works pretty well. A degree from an R1 institute / high compensation / English tests are all possible ways to go about it. Why not clamp down on universities like Northwestern Polytechnic University to avoid bogus F1 students in the first place ?
Affirmative action, means it is already easy for underrepresented communities to get admitted to get admitted to CS programs. Diversity programs makes getting jobs a lot simpler for such groups as well. It is not like Asians & Indians are unjustly taking away jobs from good and honest hard working Americans. The ones making big bucks are the best students from 2 countries with an unbelievable amount of competition.
You know what the most funny thing is ? Most Infosys employees usually don't earn enough to have better QOL to settle with their wives in the US. These guys are all sending money back home. It is the top university grads who don't get the same kind of compensation in India, that will look to settle with their family in the US. This change might actually have the opposite of it's intended effect.
That is assuming that it is not based just blatant xenophobia.
Today, most graduate students are foreign. Letting those go is a huge brain drain. Ideally you want them to stay and transfer their knowledge through work.